Kathy Nimmer and New Teacher Support

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Vicki Davis (00:00): Welcome back, educator. This is Vicki Davis with Cool Cat Teacher Talk. Today’s show is an inspiring one. We’re calling it “Because Someone Noticed.”

Announcer (00:11): Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tech tips, and inspiration to elevate your teaching.

Kathy Nimmer (00:24): We tend to find what we seek, so choose to seek that good. Choose to look for those things.

Vicki Davis (00:29): You just heard Kathy Nimmer. She taught high school English for 29 years and is totally blind. This year, the American Foundation for the Blind gave her the Helen Keller Achievement Award for 2026. Now, we’ll get to her interview, which is so inspiring. But let’s talk about “because someone noticed”. So this is Vicki Davis.

John Davis (00:54): And this is John Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:55): We’re going to break down some of the news we’re talking about right now. First of all, John, an article broke on NBC News that was repeated from Chalkbeat. And it was about all of the AI slop that ended up on Teachers Pay Teachers. In the meantime, I’m part of a Teachers Pay Teachers forum. And a lot of people are having their stores just taken away and revoked because of this, even some people who say they’re not using AI at all. So AI slop, John, seems to be a word that a lot of people are throwing around right now.

John Davis (01:32): Well, a big part of that is that people are using AI to flag AI, and a lot of the times it’s not good at picking that up.

Vicki Davis (01:41): Yeah, so AI detectors do not work. We know that. We’re going to talk about an MIT report in just a minute that says that. There’s actually a thing now on LinkedIn where you can pick a button and say this is AI slop. And Claude now, Anthropic, says that they’re putting a watermark in all of their material to say that it is AI, quote, created. Well, the problem I have with that is that we use Claude and some other tools for AI transcripts. So if it’s you and me talking like we’re talking right now, why would that somehow be marked as AI? Like, that bothers me.

John Davis (02:22): Malicious bots can use the report that says AI and just completely flood a video with reports, even if it’s made by a human.

Vicki Davis (02:32): Well, there was a short story that some time ago was reported, and they won a prize, and somebody used an AI detector on it and said, oh, this was created by AI. Well, the person since has gone back and shown their whole process, all the revision savings, all the pieces, all the different parts of when they created that story. And that’s been debunked, that the AI detector, that that was a false positive. But that author had to go back through and mark everything and really had a black mark put against them because of a false positive of artificial intelligence. And the point is, we can’t really tell. So we’re desperately looking for a way to say AI wrote it or not.

Vicki Davis (03:15): But not all AI use is the same. I just don’t think that an AI used for a transcript is the same as someone using AI to totally create a paper. Let’s go to the MIT report that just came out. In August 13, 2026, MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching and Learning and Research Training released a report that is worth reading. I like that the report says to be humble and be bold, But one other thing it says is it says that Instructors told the committee that policing AI was damaging their relationship with students and that students told them they were afraid of being wrongfully accused, just like that author we talked about. And the committee wrote, such an underground river of mutual suspicion is no foundation for a healthy classroom.

Vicki Davis (04:09): It also says that detectors are unreliable and misfire on second language and neurodivergent writers. So we’re realizing that this whole AI detection, AI conversation, like that’s impacting the classroom everywhere. All AI use is just not the same. So I want to go back to this MIT report. And this is for MIT trying to grapple with what are we going to do in the AI age?

Vicki Davis (04:38): It says that all of us who teach at MIT will need to be prepared to help students understand both that the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma, but themselves, their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight and judgment.

Vicki Davis (05:03): And I really like that they are talking to their students about what learning looks like. Because as we’ve been going through this whole AI process, one thing that I’ve taught my students is, hey, there’s a productive struggle involved in learning. They go on to use a word that I love called cognitive surrender. Basically, when someone gives up and uses AI to cognitively surrender, which basically means I can’t think about it. I can’t figure it out. I don’t know what it is. I surrender. I’m just going to let AI pretend to do this work for me. That that’s a real problem. John, do you feel like that that is the true AI slop when somebody cognitively surrenders?

Vicki Davis (05:45): AI can’t think, but just let’s AI produce something that they’re pretending to think. So I know that you’re not a huge fan of AI. We cover AI a lot, but we use AI for editing these shows. And sometimes AI can do some stuff, I mean, better than us, because face it, we fatigue. So like, how do you decide when you’re editing our shows when to use AI and when not to? Like, what can it do better and how can it help you?

John Davis (06:13): Well, because I’m dyslexic, I can’t find everything that’s wrong with a transcript. So if there is a misspelling more often than not it’ll pick it up or if there is something that I will miss like punctuation and the like inside the transcript things that are, would take me hours and it can do in like a minute I’ll let it do that but, like actually getting a hold of, the message I don’t let it do that because it’ll take the human out of it.

Vicki Davis (06:45): Yeah and AI is terrible at being creative and if it’s truly unique a lot of times it’ll suggest that we cut it now it does do fact checking pretty well but you know this week I searched for the hallucination rate of current AI models and I did it on Google and I got that generative search. Well, I took that generative search, I plugged it into Claude, Claude found a bunch of errors. I cross-checked it with ChatGPT. ChatGPT actually found an error that Claude made, went back and forth between these different models.

Vicki Davis (07:14): Now, there is a word for that that I have found and that word is called ensembling. It’s actually using one AI model against another to try to improve the accuracy rate of the output. But I’ll say that just trying to get the hallucination rate was pretty much impossible because it gave me this big simple answer. But the fact was, it was mixing together a bunch of research reports that weren’t even measuring the same thing. I have to go to the original source documents because a lot of times it is wrong. Here’s the thing is that AI has uses and we don’t want to cognitively surrender. We need to be noticing. I mean, that is what this whole show is about today is actually noticing.

Vicki Davis (08:03): So back to the MIT story, what they’re after is that they want AI to be pro-learner. This is their phrase that they use. So we don’t want AI to do the hard fun of thinking, learning, creating, and problem solving. So these are the things that we need to be thinking about. We need to be talking about AI safety and how to use it safely and wisely.

Vicki Davis (08:25): But also, I think things like productive struggle, cognitive surrender need to be part of our language, and we need to be noticing. Like, one thing that the MIT report talked about was to encourage professors to start doing things like oral reports, documenting process, that you would actually document the whole process of how you created something.

Vicki Davis (08:49): Portfolios for a class, actually putting things together that represent the thinking of the human and having those conversations. I actually think conversations with your professors and with teachers and with teaching assistants is actually a great thing to do. I think the AI slop is on the other side of cognitive surrender. Like that to me is what AI slop is. So there is another story called A Great AI Regret and about AI guilt. And so these are AI native graduates, graduates of college who basically used AI to get through college. This AI guilt is a named phenomenon among recent grads. People who are never caught using AI but feel the loss of the learning.

Vicki Davis (09:35): Obviously, they cognitively surrendered their learning to AI and they realize that they’re the product of college and they didn’t learn anything. One person on Reddit, and I know we’re quoting Reddit here, but is redoing her senior year assignments on her own.

Vicki Davis (09:52): A U.K. study, they went in and they used AI to submit these exams without the professors knowing. And the AI written exam submissions went 94% undetected and scored above the average real student. So keeping AI out of classes is important for all the students because we grade on GPA, right? If AI goes and makes a better grade than average students, average students feel like their humanness is not respected. So this isn’t a doom stat here. This is one that says, hey, we need to deal with this cognitive surrender, with this disillusionment. And if we’re just letting some AI write an exam, we need to actually talk to the person who supposedly completed that exam. But, John, what do you think about AI regret?

John Davis (10:47): I think that comes down to, well, you know, college debt is a big issue. People are going to debt, going to college to get a degree just to have AI completely take away all the learning they would have done if they actually did the work. And now they’re in debt for having done basically nothing.

Vicki Davis (11:07): And they don’t know anything either if they have cognitively surrendered. And this goes deeper. And I love this story because there was a teacher, Patrick O’Neill, and he taught at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington. So he had a full course load, but he read some meta-analyses claiming that GenAI produced large positive effects on learning. And he started saying, OK, this doesn’t look right. So he went and taught himself the field. He read 40 papers and chapters on meta-analytic methods, and then 14 GenAI education meta-analysis, read all 60 underlying studies, and then he produced a forensic review that shook everyone. So here you have a teacher at a community college who has shaken the education space All because he noticed. He found that 11 of the 14 meta-analyses had no study population criteria.

Vicki Davis (12:04): That meant that children in a study could be pooled with medical trainees. Okay, six included a paper with fabricated citations. And three included a study citing references published before November 2022 that referred to ChatGPT. Now, we know ChatGPT became publicly available November 30th, 2022. So studies citing references on the use of ChatGPT prior to 2022 have to be false. And so my friend, Justin Reich from MIT, who’s been on this show and wrote Failure to Disrupt, said publicly on LinkedIn that he had to retract his own advice that meta-analyses are a reliable way to synthesize evidence, at least for the GenAI era. So I love this because a working teacher with a full class load did the work that the journals didn’t.

Vicki Davis (13:01): We as humans, we need to notice. We need to notice when students are cognitively surrendering.

Vicki Davis (13:08): We need to notice what’s happening if we’re going to try to do the AI detection charade. We need to notice the harm that’s doing on our relationships. We need to notice that when we’re having kids handwrite everything because we’re afraid of AI, that gives a disadvantage to those dyslexic, dysgraphic students or students who just struggle to spell. We need to take the best of, okay, this is the best of what technology can give us, but we need to be detecting learning. So we need to make sure that the humans are the people actually doing the learning and we need to understand that the person is the outcome of the education, not the grade. Things have got to change and we’ve got to look at things differently and we have to notice.

Vicki Davis (13:58): So John, is there anything you want to say based on what I just talked about?

John Davis (14:02): Well, I feel like a lot of these studies could be generative AI itself, because a lot of the news articles, people could summarize this interview, and then they’ll write on the summarization, but if there’s an, hallucination inside that, they’ll end up writing on that. So I think that’s a big issue in news itself. And then once it’s out there, news becomes self-referential. There’s also a different story I wanted to tell. When you were talking about the AI charade, There was a story about NASA when they were first testing out different rocket fuels. Eventually, some hydrogen escaped and caught on fire. Hydrogen does not burn on the visible light spectrum.

John Davis (14:46): So there was this burning invisible air in front of people that if you walked into it, you would catch on fire. So people had to hold mops out in front of them. And when they saw the mop catch fire, they knew the hydrogen was there. It’s cause and effect. people are going out in the workforce without learning anything and whenever they walk into the workforce they’ll catch fire because they don’t know anything because they completely offloaded everything to AI.

John Davis (15:14): So they’re the burning hydrogen out there right now and unless they take steps like that person talked about having to relearn everything because they offloaded their, cognitive thinking to AI they’re gonna catch fire and they’re gonna be the burning hydrogen in the room.

Vicki Davis (15:33): Wow. I would encourage everybody listening to this show to go read that report of AI in education from MIT as an example of an organization that’s grappling with artificial intelligence and how it’s teaching and learning move forward. Okay, so every story we talked about has people noticing, noticing where things are not the quality they need to be, noticing where they’re not measuring up to what human excellence looks like. Noticing where artificial intelligence is not being used properly. Our guest today has built an entire career out of noticing, noticing the good. Here’s Kathy Nimmer.

Announcer (16:15): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (16:19): Today we’re talking with Kathy Nimmer. She taught high school English for 29 years and then she spent the last three years doing something a lot of districts don’t think to do. Built a program whose whole job is protecting the joy of brand new teachers. Kathy is the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year and a National Teacher of the Year finalist. This year, she received the Helen Keller Achievement Award 2026 from the American Foundation for the Blind. Kathy, thank you for coming on the show.

Kathy Nimmer (16:54): I have been looking so forward to this. Thank you for having me.

Vicki Davis (16:57): Kathy, we want to go back to your first year teaching, and you’ve done quite a few interviews on this. I don’t want to steal the Thunder. Just tell the story so that everybody listening can just understand. Because my first year was rocky and I know yours was too. So let’s talk about it.

Kathy Nimmer (17:17): Rocky is a mild term, I can say. Let’s call it the Rocky Mountains, perhaps. I think that’s a little more apt. I’m totally blind and I am smart. I’m capable. I’m driven. And I’m still looking back at that super young, naive teacher. Everybody starts there. Totally blind teaching in a regular public high school classroom. First, I didn’t know what I was doing since I was a new teacher. Second, I didn’t know how to be. And that statement is pivotal to my career because I’m Here I am as a person who cannot see anything and I wanted to be a great teacher. So I knew that was one thing I wanted to be. I didn’t know where the blindness fit into that. So my early choice was to minimize that.

Kathy Nimmer (18:03): So I did all the wrong things to try to be less blind or make that less central. I didn’t want to bump into furniture in the classroom when I was teaching, so I stayed behind the podium. I didn’t move around. I didn’t want to call on the wrong student or get the name wrong, so I didn’t call on students. I lectured. Kind of silly and free and enthusiastic, but I didn’t want to do that without being able to really gauge their response since I couldn’t see the visual cues, so I was really stern. All the things that in hindsight were poor teaching choices, but done with justified intent. After the fascination of having a blind teacher, it caused just such a wide open door for disconnection, for misbehavior, chaos.

Kathy Nimmer (18:49): And I didn’t have any answers because I was certain I was right about trying to minimize my disability. It was nuts. I wasn’t building relationships. I wasn’t being my authentic self. It was chaotic and the big climactic piece that is part of plenty of my speeches because it’s real.

Kathy Nimmer (19:06): A couple months in, the kids were horsing around before class and two kids were playing catch with a loaded book bag. This was back when there were heavy textbooks instead of digital textbooks. One kid tossed his bag to another whose catching ability was approximately like mine. The bag slammed into my window in the classroom, and the whole window shattered. Glass flew. The sound was gigantic. It was horrifying. I remember standing there just with my hands on my face and Everyone came running, you know, everyone. I feel like the whole school came running and It was other students, it was teachers, it was administrators. I just wanted to disappear. That moment, a plan B for a different thing I wanted to do that I felt called to do besides teaching, that would have been the moment to start pursuing that.

Kathy Nimmer (19:56): But I didn’t, everything shattered. I started not trusting my own decisions because how could I be right that I was supposed to be a teacher when this happened? My principal had every right to let me go at that point. But you know what? They didn’t. They let me have the year. And I came back after pure devastation, after I decided to change my approach and brought my authentic self to the classroom because I figured they wouldn’t ask me back anyway the next year. But I had a little time to play and become different from how I started. Things started changing and there was enough change, enough authenticity, enough joking, moving around, building relationships, being light, being the person with a disability, being okay with it.

Kathy Nimmer (20:41): The students started to feel more okay and they kept me for one more year. And really, when I started being authentically myself, that included my blindness, then started the year that way, then everything changed.

Kathy Nimmer (20:56): Shifted my career, but needed to include that shattered window because otherwise I wouldn’t have figured it out that we need to bring our true selves, our abilities and our limitations to everything to the classroom. I think back to that time and I think of what I needed, what I had, what I didn’t have, what I learned about me, what I learned about life. I am glad that it began that way. I wasn’t glad when it was happening, but I’m glad it began that way because it launched me into a career that is the signature of my professional being. I am a teacher and it began there.

Vicki Davis (21:29): And I love what you said. I mean, you’ve been interviewed by CBS, you’ve had TED Talks, of course, Indiana Teacher of the Year, finalist for National Teacher of the Year. So we didn’t just get it together a little bit. You just really had an amazing classroom. But you said that even though you’re blind, you learned to see your students. Okay, so help me understand that beautiful, wonderful sentence and what it means to you to see your students.

Kathy Nimmer (21:59): It’s an advantage or maybe a superpower that I didn’t understand at the beginning. As my momentum built and I reflected, because I’m a strong believer that we need to reflect after everything that we do, the things that don’t go well, why that didn’t go well, and the things that are going well, why it’s going well. I think both sides are important. When I started seeing changes in my classroom and I started thinking, what’s happening here? Why is this so much better? And I realized that whole relationship piece, which we all know is crucial for educators. I thought, okay, I’m getting to know my students, but what do I know about them? What I don’t know about them is their hair color and their weight and whether they’re going through a spell of acne.

Kathy Nimmer (22:48): I taught teenagers, so, you know, we’ve got all the things going on, right? About everyone else who’s in those transitional phases. I didn’t know those things. And I was still thriving with the relationships. And it just dawned on me one day, I’m getting to see my students from the heart. That doesn’t mean that I had it all completely figured out of factors that…

Kathy Nimmer (23:12): Intuitively cause us to make quick judgments. None of those things are in place for me because I am listening to their voice. I am reading what they’re submitting. I am hearing the silences and the things they’re saying. And I’m not distracted by the visuals, the price of their clothing or the brand of their shoes or things like that. And there are disadvantages, not picking up on some language or the look. There are other things that are harder, but seeing them for who they are is easier for me. I’ll take that. The harder stuff with being blind, there’s plenty of that, but I’m sure going to take the wins as well.

Vicki Davis (23:56): I think it’s a beautiful attitude. Some of your students have publicly said, I didn’t know I was a writer. And Ms. Nimmer helped me see, What’s your message to those who struggle at first, that first year? Because we’re getting ready to talk about your new teacher program. And most of us, me included, my first year was pretty terrible.

Kathy Nimmer (24:19): When I’m looking back, I wish it were a better first year. I’m a big believer in the word and versus but. I feel like but counts what’s in the front part of the sentence and includes the front and the back of the sentence, the whole picture.

Kathy Nimmer (24:35): I wish it were an easier first year and I would not be the teacher I became without that first year. I think going into an early career experience, you’re going in with wide eyes and a lot of hope in your heart. And I hope you come out of that with wide eyes and a whole lot of hope in your heart in spite of all the things that happen along the way, because things will happen. You don’t have it figured out. You don’t have the context that everything will be OK. And you know that and you can lean on that because you don’t have that experience. There are so many moments that are going to unfold that are good and hard both just going in with that realistic view that learning requires change we’re asking that of our students we’re asking them to not be married to old ways that stay there just because they’ve always been that way we’re asking them to stretch and change and for the new teacher that has to be a baseline that has to be foundational.

Kathy Nimmer (25:37): Every day is progress, and it’s not measured by how well it went or how poorly it went. It’s measured by the sunrise every morning. There is a chance to get better, and getting better means reflecting on what is going well, what is not going well, and why, and then harnessing that knowledge, keep moving forward to that next sunrise and that next sunrise.

Vicki Davis (26:00): So let’s talk about the new teacher program that you’ve been working with for the last three years.

Kathy Nimmer (26:06): It began with a beautiful alignment of when I was Teacher of the Year, coming off of that year of service of traveling and doing hundreds of presentations and public events. And my district wanted to capitalize on what I had learned and where my passion was and keep me in the classroom. So we created this hybrid role for me to teach part of the day and then simply to pour in the new teachers the other part of the day. There was no name for the program. There was the knowledge that new teachers needed more than they were getting. And we didn’t have the answers. We just had that need. And what a beautiful thing to work for leadership today. That recognizes that. So still teaching and still grading and still loving that.

Kathy Nimmer (26:51): And then I just traveled around the district and I visited the new teachers. I visited them when they were teaching. I visited them when they were not teaching. And I simply loved on them. Can you imagine a better job than that?

Kathy Nimmer (27:04): Pouring it to them, like lifting them up the same way I had lifted up students, just this time, just listening to them and affirming them. Over those years of the hybrid experience COVID approach. And my leadership, again, very wise and insightful, knew that this would change things in education. And this was the time to commit to creating a new program, a true program with protocols, with depth. And that would be my whole focus. At the COVID year was the creation, lots of research, deep thought about what the program would be and the naming of it, which was beautiful. We called it SEEDS, S-E-E-D-S, Supporting Educators Entering District Service, and all kinds of free analogies and growth and all of that.

Kathy Nimmer (27:53): That’s what I pivoted to do full-time, pour into the true newbies, those 22-year-olds, but also everybody, all newcomers who were in our district for the first time.

Kathy Nimmer (28:05): And I did that on lots of levels. But I will tell you without a doubt, the core of that program and the core of my belief system is not based on professional development. It’s not based on access to resources. It is based on love and happiness and well-being. It’s the same thing that I discovered as a new teacher after that window shattered, that when we are in a situation that is a place to grow, we are only going to grow if we feel loved and nurtured, recognized and seen. So I simply took all those principles that I used in the classroom and To make a difference with my students, I simply took that and made that the center of this program and just found ways to love those teachers and to nurture their happiness and take care of their well-being so that they could thrive.

Kathy Nimmer (28:57): Because there was no way I could ever know what professional advice to give to a kindergarten teacher one morning and a high school chemistry teacher the same afternoon. Yeah.

Kathy Nimmer (29:10): There was no use trying to be that answer. That’s not what good, true new teacher support is, in my opinion. It is loving them. It is nurturing them. It is speaking the affirmation. One of my favorite practices in the program is called affirmative observations. So I would schedule a half hour to an hour where I would just come into their classroom, open my computer, put my earbud in because I have a screen reader, a real robotic and actually rather creepy sounding.

Kathy Nimmer (29:45): And I would take notes for the solid, the entire time I was in there, only on the good things, only every single positive that I heard. Nothing negative, nothing suggested, nothing. And just all these affirmations. And I can’t tell you how many teachers were so nervous about having me come in. They see somebody taking notes in the corner of the room and they’re thinking of their administrator doing an evaluation. And that’s intimidating. That first time I often had to push my way in, but I did push for that because when it’s something good, it is worth being pushy about it. And I’d write this, clean it up, and I’d send this to them. And they would receive this huge email of pure affirmation. That’s it.

Kathy Nimmer (30:28): There’s no catch, Nothing. Just hearing the things. Even down to, I loved your tone of voice when you talked to Jane about stopping this or whatever. Just anything I overheard, I affirmed. Could we make the world a better place if that was our default communication? Yes. And I can’t change the world, but I could change those classroom experiences. And what happened because some skeptical colleagues thought those affirmative observations would make a teacher complacent. Okay, I’m doing all of these things so well. And you know this, I bet, and your listeners know this. A true educator does not become complacent when they are affirmed. They become grateful and thirsty to amplify that and keep it.

Kathy Nimmer (31:18): Why do we ever think it’s not that way? You’re not falling into education. You are choosing education because you’re drawn that way. There are a lot of easier careers to fall into that don’t require the emotional price that teaching commands. So if they’re there, they’re there because they were drawn there. And so if I’m affirming those things, those little things that they don’t even notice, their wait time and their movement and how many times they called students by name is always so important. All those things. That’s just so simple, right? The low hanging fruit, the thing we can all do. Speaking those words of affirmation. I didn’t have that as much as I needed it when I was a new teacher.

Kathy Nimmer (32:00): But boy, I sure can give it now.

Vicki Davis (32:02): This is the thing is the observations. I don’t know why those who do the observations think that it’s really important to find everything that’s wrong. Because a true observation, it is the and you talked about earlier. We can have great things and we can have areas in proof, but you’re right. Kathy, I’ve always been my biggest critic. And sometimes when I just hear negative, I wonder, should I even be doing this? You know, I mean, we go into that. And then if I ever had anybody who would come in and notice something positive, I could go for months on that praise because you are proud of the things you do. And it is hard and it is difficult. You know, I bet you had some teachers who received that email who just came back to you and what were the kind of things they would say to you when they would receive that email.

Kathy Nimmer (32:56): The emails I saved because I hope every teacher has that folder they create in their inbox, you know, a subfolder of things to save. My folder, I named it saving. That was a word that mattered to me because I was saving these things. But honestly, those things were saving me at the same time because they were the words of shock, of deep emotion, of I didn’t even know that this was happening. I didn’t know that I did these things. It’s more than in the classroom that we need this. And my sector of influence during the time of building and directing this program was the classroom. And if I could give them that there, then they were going to use that.

Kathy Nimmer (33:41): And I’m a strong believer too on specifics. So not just great job. Great job is a nice starting point.

Kathy Nimmer (33:48): Great job with blah, blah, blah. And that’s the English teacher in me. That’s the person who’s graded probably thousands of short stories and research papers and all of that. I was strongly committed to specific feedback. And I just translated that into the new teacher support as well. Because great job doesn’t stick when you don’t know what was great, what you didn’t maybe even recognized as great. I love that. And I love outside of the K-12 scene, I love being a person committed to those things. And I thirst for that myself. And when I’m struggling personally about something that’s not even related to my profession, sometimes call up that friend who’s really good at this too, you know, really good at that specific affirmation, because we all need that.

Kathy Nimmer (34:35): The human heart needs that, that fervor and that honesty. And I loved giving that to the new teachers.

Vicki Davis (34:42): So, Kathy, I believe this program, you received some grants. And what was the success of the program for new teachers?

Kathy Nimmer (34:50): We did wonderful things. And the state of Indiana created several pathways to recognize various initiatives, new programs for all different specific focus points throughout the state. And so as SEEDS gained momentum and, of course, looked different the second year from the first year and the third year from the second year, as we all should be looking different as educators, the program was evolving as well. So we applied for a grant that was connected to an award from the state of Indiana, and the award was called Excellence in Leading and Learning.

Kathy Nimmer (35:33): And we were the proud recipients of that grant $225,000 for amazing, just like Christmas Day surprise type, like wow things for all of our educators. And then a chance to be celebrated at a big banquet by the state for daring to dream and act on the dream. And that really, again, circles back to a leadership team from the top down, from the bottom up that knew that it was worth an investment in our newest teachers for practical reasons. We want them to stay and we want them to thrive. So recruitment and retention. So the tangible, numeric outcomes. But for the bigger reason of well-being and happiness and knowing that somebody who is in the heart is going to be more impactful for the students, be more likely to lead and take risks and recover from the hard moments.

Kathy Nimmer (36:44): And so what a privilege to work for a leadership team that knew that, to be trusted as the person to create the program, coordination with the central office folks.

Kathy Nimmer (36:58): And yet with such independence given to me to really dig in and create, I have actually myself recently taken an early retirement and handed the program off to the next director and carry on all the principles of the program as I do professional development and speaking opportunities and consulting and simultaneous to that. So, so proud that I created something that is of lasting impact. So my teacher classes in SEEDS were, I’m certain, the biggest that our district will ever have because turnover, as you know, was a growing issue before COVID. And then post-COVID, the numbers have been just gigantic. SEEDS simultaneously grew into existence at that time.

Kathy Nimmer (37:50): So we had so many new teachers, so many needs, so many teachers coming in who were not trained, who were coming in on alternate pathways and taking classes at the same time, like so much. I was able to lead and grow seeds beside and with them. Some of the best, best memories of my education career will always be during that season. The sapling of seeds was wonderful to witness.

Vicki Davis (38:17): So this year, and you do have so many opportunities because you’re the 2026 award winner of the Helen Keller Award, and that’s not an award you apply for. They basically find you. Now, when that happened, describe it. I mean, were you surprised? And then when you received it, like, what were the things that you said? Because that is just remarkable receiving that award.

Kathy Nimmer (38:43): So when you said my first year was rocky and I said, that’s a mild word. I will say surprise is a mild word for the Helen Keller because you do not apply. You are not nominated. Like there is no pathway. It is happening everywhere. Outside of you. When I got the call from the American Foundation for the Blind, I did not answer the call because I thought it was a spam. Would they be calling me? I did not. I literally did not answer. Let it go to voicemail. And it did go to voicemail. So I listened to that and I recognized the name of their CEO and I recognized his voice and like, huh, this is either a highly sophisticated scam or it’s really them.

Kathy Nimmer (39:25): And of course, the message didn’t say why he was calling, but I called him back and he told me and I was so excited and really thrilled until I hung up and I researched the award and the past winners and everything went Downward when I saw Stevie Wonder’s name on that list. And lots of people who are not disabled but have made an impact on the world of disability with access and inclusion. And the reason I went spiraling down is my name does not match those. And I stand by that. It is not, we are not the same. And I’m always my harshest critic, but, you know, we’re so self-aware when we’re those reflective people, we’re so aware of all the ways that we have fallen short.

Kathy Nimmer (40:10): And I know those things well. And that began quite the process for a couple of months. It was embargoed information, so I couldn’t share beyond my inner circle. So it was quietly sitting with this discomfort of, my gosh, when people know and they see my name on there, they were going to think, oh, they must have really been short of candidates.

Vicki Davis (40:32): No, you’re here. I’m not going to let you keep putting yourself down because a teaching is so noble and it’s so underappreciated. And that’s who you are.

Kathy Nimmer (40:41): Well, and that’s where I ultimately landed. My superintendent, who I’ve referenced, not by name, but Dr. Scott Hanback, who was behind me for the creation of seeds. The turning point with my acceptance of the Helen Keller really happened in a conversation with him when he quoted Philippians 4:8 about focusing on the things that are lovely and good and true and right.

Kathy Nimmer (41:08): And he talked about how we are used, we’re not just grown in the valley, we are also grown on the mountaintop, and that there was purpose in all of it. And I settled in around that. When I won Teacher of the Year, I knew I wasn’t the best teacher in Indiana. I wasn’t one of the top four teachers in the nation. I knew those things.

Kathy Nimmer (41:30): But it was an active part of that competition cycle. There were interviews and like all of that. This Helen Keller felt like I had nothing to do with it at first, and then it just felt so wrong in such a poor fit and then thinking about it, it’s like, you know, if this award is recognizing someone who simply followed her passion and kept looking for that sunrise day after day after day, if that’s what the message is in me receiving this award, then so be it. Because that’s what most people have the chance to do. It’s that rare air where there’s somebody famous and, you know, doing all the superstar things. I’m not a superstar. I am somebody who had a calling and found my way forward one step at a time.

Kathy Nimmer (42:15): And if that’s a messaging that is given to people with disabilities or people watching the world of disability, if that’s the part that is named after Helen Keller, the part of the struggle before the big breakthrough, not just everything that happened after that, then I can sit in that and I can stand in that and I can be okay in that because that is true and it is right and it is good. And it was a beautiful experience. I loved the opportunity to represent Somebody not reaching for the stars, but simply, again, watching for that sunrise and believing that there was purpose in every day. And yes, it was a beautiful thing.

Vicki Davis (42:54): But if you think about Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, her teacher, she saw Helen and saw the greatness in her when nobody else did. And it was a teacher who persisted and made it through. She had far more than a broken window, Anne Sullivan. I mean, Helen fought her, and it was more than thankless for so many years. And here is this brilliant child inside, and I think it’s very fitting for a teacher. And I know you’ve told me previously that your friends say that you’re a grab-a-tissue kind of speaker, and you are because I’ll tell you something that I’ve not shared on the air. Philippians 4:8 is my litmus test for who I have on the show. It is my litmus test for what I choose to air, if it’s praiseworthy, if it’s excellent.

Vicki Davis (43:50): Because we’re supposed to, our minds are so needing to think on the positive and the good things. It doesn’t mean that there’s not bad things in the world. It doesn’t mean that there are controversies or injustice. I’m not saying any of that, you know. But we need to choose how we think. And when we’re a teacher, it is so important. That we control our thought life.

Kathy Nimmer (44:14): Yes.

Vicki Davis (44:15): Because if our thought life gets away from us, we lose what you talked about earlier, the emotional strength to continue to do the job because we have so much negative coming at us all the time. I mean, we work with kids, for goodness sakes. They’re not known to be the most positive human beings on the planet at that stage and age. They tend, you know, complaining kind of becomes a hobby of middle schoolers and many high schoolers. So this focusing on the excellent and the praiseworthy. And I’m glad you accepted the award. I think it’s poetic and beautiful. And speaking of poetry, you are a poet. So is there a line you would love every teacher to carry into this school year?

Kathy Nimmer (45:03): Two things. Two things that I ask the new teachers to hold. I ask the mid-career teachers to hold and those teachers who are almost at the finish line all two things. Number one, we tend to find what we seek. What you were just saying about the good and focusing on the good does not ignore the truth that there are hard things. But our brains are inclined to remember those hard things so well. So we don’t need help with that. We also don’t need help from our hardened next door colleague to remember the negative either. Like that’s going to happen. We’ve got that. So we tend to find what we seek. So choose to seek that good. Choose to look for those things.

Kathy Nimmer (45:47): That’s what I was doing with the affirmative observations. You know, I think those were as much of a gift to myself as to those teachers, because all I was doing was looking for the good. And I found it in every single classroom, every single classroom. We tend to find what we seek, so choose what you are seeking. And number two, make sure that you are always remembering that sunrise is always Because no matter whether a day went incredibly well or poorly, no matter whether you have that parent, the nightmare situation with a parent, or that administrator who doesn’t vibe with you, there’s a tomorrow. And with every sunrise, it’s fresh. And that is so cliche, and it is still so true.

Kathy Nimmer (46:32): Both things can be accurate. There is a tomorrow, and you have that choice. You have that choice every time the bell rings to come in with a new attitude. Every time that a student has a need, you have that choice. It’s always new.

Kathy Nimmer (46:48): And I sure don’t have it all figured out. And I sure have had hard seasons. And, you know, it’s a constant process. And knowing that the sunrise is always there, gosh, even when I literally can’t see it, knowing that it’s there, that is the difference maker for me.

Vicki Davis (47:07): Sometimes you meet these people who you feel like see life more clearly than others. And, Kathy, you can say what you want to about yourself, but I do believe you clearly see the classroom and you clearly see the struggle and that you’re a great representative of us teachers. And I do want to talk about this because as somebody who’s used assistive tech your whole career, what is actually helping with assistive tech these days? And those who say, okay, I’m blind, I want to contribute, I want to add to the world like Helen Keller and like Kathy Nimmer. What are some of the important things that they need to master so that they can truly impact a profession just like you have?

Kathy Nimmer (47:59): Such a complicated picture. It’s competency and the basic things. So I have a screen reader that helps me navigate on the laptop and my iPhone. So it’s competency in those things. It’s strong skills in your area of focus. So rightly or wrongly, I think I needed to be in the upper half of teaching ability to compensate for any doubts that came along with, can I even do this because I am blind? And I’m talking about internal doubts and doubts of others, both, both. So really strong development of your skills in your area. You can’t be average.

Kathy Nimmer (48:44): Maybe should. You should be able to be average, but you can’t be. You need to be in the stronger part to prove the doubters wrong. And all of that can be in place. While the world still sees three candidates, one is blind, it’s going to be easier to go with one of the other two. And so it’s that whole advocacy, resilience, that whole awareness, that whole staying positive, not just for yourself, but to spread a belief in the world that is not disabled, that people with disabilities actually can do the things and actually can be among your best potential employees. And they need that chance. That door needs to be opened. On top of that, those of us need also to be willing to mentor and through that open door, help usher someone else through.

Kathy Nimmer (49:39): It’s not much of a door if it only opens to one person.

Vicki Davis (49:42): But, you know, life is not easy for anybody. It’s more difficult for others, absolutely. I only had my eyes, quote, I guess you’d call them fixed or whatever. I have some cornea stuff. I don’t have your situation. But I did have a month where I really… Struggle to see. After that particular surgery, I couldn’t make the screen readers work. I was so limited in what I could do. I tried and it was a month of like, how am I going to do this? And how do those who can’t see, you know, use all these technologies? It does take persistence. It doesn’t come easily. But I want you to think about as we’re finishing up, let’s talk about the people in your career who truly saw you.

Vicki Davis (50:25): Because in order to have opportunities for people with disabilities, with differences, who struggle, we’ve got to have those people who saw you, right? They saw the greatness in you before you realized you could even do it. Describe those people and the kind of things they said to you at the key moments in your career. So that 30 years later, this career that has not only helped your students but has helped new teachers stay in the classroom. Who are those people? You can name names or not. It’s just up to you. But I want to kind of get the kinds of things they said and how they saw you so that I can be that person for somebody else.

Kathy Nimmer (51:08): It’s so many. It’s just this huge array. It’s the second grade teacher who saw me suddenly struggling when I had been succeeding and suspected that I needed glasses because I was a fully sighted child and started to struggle in second grade. And she didn’t just brush it off as me needing some academic ceiling that was now suddenly making errors show up. She thought harder and watched and suggested that I needed glasses, which began the whole chase down of what was going on and ultimately a diagnosis of impending blindness.

Kathy Nimmer (51:47): If she hadn’t seen so early, I wouldn’t have been able to track the progress of what was happening with my vision, which affected every part of my life. It was my parents. Five doctors told my parents that there was nothing wrong with my vision. I was doing this to get attention, making it up, and they believed more. And through my whole life, I’m fortunate to still have them. They’re in their 80s now. And my whole life, they were afraid for choices I made and always ended up being my biggest cheerleaders. The consummate belief in me. It was the fifth grade teacher who took off of school to go down to the School for the Blind with us to tour when we knew I would be going there in sixth grade.

Kathy Nimmer (52:30): She wanted to make sure the school was good enough and that I would be educated well there. She took a personal day to go down three hours away with us to tour that campus. And hearing her voice in the hallways that I would call home, literally living there and being schooled there for seven years through middle and high school was amazing. It was the professors who helped when my vision had dropped a lot in college. And, you know, ultimately it was that first principal who hired me, I think, because I had credentials, but also because he liked to be first and the daring. He liked to be on the cutting edge. So I was the first.

Kathy Nimmer (53:11): Blind teacher in anywhere around here. And I’m sure he regretted that for a little while, but I know ultimately he didn’t. He saw beyond where I was and took that risk. And honestly, it was the students who, once they started responding to me, were the affirmation that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. And so many more, you know, pastors, counselors, and therapists because, yeah, it’s not been squeaky clean and easy for me all the time. Colleagues, the colleague who defended me to another colleague who said I was only winning awards because I was blind and they felt sorry for me. The whole array, the believers and the doubters and those who’ve stayed by who I am and reminded me of who I am and whose I am.

Kathy Nimmer (54:03): I am not alone and none of us not one of us is alone thank God absolutely

Vicki Davis (54:09): Thank God for sure and I appreciate you telling your raw, honest story. What’s your encouragement to that new teacher going in the classroom this school year? You have words.

Kathy Nimmer (54:21): I’m an English teacher, so I always have words.

Vicki Davis (54:24): Oh, no.

Kathy Nimmer (54:26): But my biggest word is just hold on to that hope. Hold on to that belief that you are here because there is a student in your classroom, maybe more than one, but it doesn’t have to be more than one. There’s a student who needs exactly and only what you, you alone can bring. I am so confident of the intricacy of the big plan that I believe that wholeheartedly, that there is somebody sitting in one of those desks whose life can be changed only by you. And you may never know who that person is. You may not know who that person is until a few years down the road. You may know it instantly. It doesn’t matter. The belief that that student is waiting for exactly what you have to bring because of your life experiences and the words you speak and the way that you are, that will keep you going.

Kathy Nimmer (55:14): So never, ever forget that someone needs you and only you. So what a privilege to be in a position to make that kind of difference.

Vicki Davis (55:22): So it’s been a privilege today. We’ve been talking with Kathy Nimmer, taught high school English for 29 years, spent the last three years helping new teachers transition into the profession. 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year, National Teacher of the Year finalist, and the 2026 Helen Keller Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind. Kathy, thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for telling your story so openly and honestly. I believe that this will be a show that will help not only new teachers, but all of us teachers to understand that we need to truly see our students, but we also need to truly see each other. And you have helped us, I will say, I guess this is a pun to see that clearly, even in the struggle of your disability of blindness.

Vicki Davis (56:13): This has been a beautiful show, and thank you for being part of it.

Kathy Nimmer (56:16): Thank you so much.

Announcer (56:19): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (56:23): Kathy said we tend to find what we seek. We opened this hour with a stack of things that went wrong. But all of these things were found by people who were looking, by people who were noticing. The reporters, the professors, the teachers who said learning isn’t happening. We need to find a better way. And then Kathy told us about her second grade teacher who noticed. Five doctors told her parents there was nothing wrong with this little girl’s eyes. She was making it up for attention. But one teacher looked at her a little longer and said, look again. And their girl went on to teach high school English for 29 years. And so much more was done because that teacher noticed. It’s important to notice if the kids in your class who are turning in these amazing papers know anything about what they wrote.

Vicki Davis (57:21): We need to move forward and we need to move forward with relationships and by encouraging and by noticing the good. There is a path forward for educators and for students and for parents who truly care about human excellence. So I hope that what you’ve gotten out of today’s show is to stop, to listen, to observe, and to take notice. You’ve been listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. This is Vicki Davis. See you later, educator.

Announcer (57:52): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Follow at Cool Cat Teacher everywhere you connect. Cool Cat Teacher.